1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information terminal, and more particularly, to an information terminal controlled through a touch screen or voice recognition and an instruction executing method thereof. The present application is based on Korean Application No. 2001-40682, filed Jul. 7, 2001, which is incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, portable information terminals using IMT2000 (International Mobile Telecommunications—Year 2000) technology are equipped with a touch screen to recognize the coordinates of the screen touched by a user and execute an instruction corresponding to the recognized coordinates.
FIG. 1 is a flowchart of a method for recognizing an instruction through a touch screen according to a conventional art. Referring to FIG. 1, items that the user can select are displayed on a touch screen of a portable information terminal. When the user selects one of the items displayed on the screen and touches the same (step 10), the portable information terminal recognizes coordinates x and y corresponding to the touched point of the screen and searches for an instruction corresponding to the recognized coordinates x and y (step 12).
If one instruction is found, the found instruction is executed (step 16). If two or more instructions are found, the found instructions are displayed again on the touch screen (step 18) and then the steps 10–14 are repeatedly performed. That is, if the item selected by the user has a plurality of sub-instructions associated therewith, the portable information terminal displays the sub-instructions on the touch screen, which enables the user to select one of the sub-instructions. Because of limitations of the screen, instructions must be executed one by one. Furthermore, the instructions must be selected many times in order to perform a specific task desired by the user.
Meanwhile, in a case where the portable information terminal recognizes a voice to perform a specific instruction, for example, if a spoken message “Please speak an instruction” is firstly submitted by the portable information terminal, the instruction must be spoken within a given time. If the given time has lapsed, the portable information terminal cannot recognize a spoken instruction and outputs another spoken message, such as, “Please speak an instruction again.” If the portable information terminal cannot recognize the user's voice, the terminal outputs spoken words, such as, “Try again in a quieter place” or “This is an instruction that cannot be executed” and terminates the instruction execution mode. Thus, portable information terminals are unsatisfactory, since they terminate an instruction execution mode unless a specific voice is recognized within a given time.